For this English chef, home is the Colorado
Plateau

On Sunday mornings, all summer long, you can
find chef John Sharpe at the Flagstaff Community Market, moving
among the outdoor produce stalls with the practiced intensity of a
hardcore bargain hunter at an outlet mall.

He tests the
white peaches Rob Lautze has grown at Garland’s Orchard near
Sedona: nice, but not enough of them for his purposes. Most of the
crop froze this year, Lautze tells him.

"Oh, how
terrible," Sharpe says. But he’s pleased to hear that
Gravenstein apples are coming soon. Sharpe likes to bake with them,
and they feature in his apple and green tomato chutney.

He pronounces it "to-mah-to." Sharpe hails from England, but his
current surroundings are about as unlike that green and misty land
as can be imagined. As chef at the Turquoise Room Restaurant in
Winslow, Ariz., he cooks sumptuous meals from local produce amid
the sere badlands and plains of the Painted Desert.

Sharpe came to the United States because he felt it suited his
entrepreneurial spirit, and he spent the 1990s as a hard-driving
restaurateur in southern California’s Orange County. In 1997,
a friend bought and began restoring Winslow’s run-down La
Posada Hotel, designed in the late 1920s by the renowned architect
Mary Colter.

"He told me, ‘I need to put a
restaurant here, but don’t know how to do it,’ " Sharpe
recalls. "I said, ‘I’ll come up whenever I can free my
ass from alligators.’ I had 350 employees, four restaurants.

"I had absolutely no intention of moving to Winslow," he
says. "But one thing led to another, and that was it. I wanted to
be a chef again."

Two years later, Sharpe and his wife,
Patricia, moved to the Painted Desert. Orange County was booming,
and had an unemployment rate of 4 percent. Winslow adjoins the
Navajo and Hopi reservations, and its unemployment varied from 20
to 40 percent. The town’s main claim to fame was a line in
"Take it Easy," a ’70s-era Eagles song about a guy trying to
hitchhike out of town. Local tastes ran more to chicken-fried steak
than to roast duck with quince and blackberry sauce.

But
Sharpe set about establishing a culinary landmark, and he’s
succeeded. Gourmet magazine has praised the restaurant. Interstate
40 travelers expecting a truck-stop meal are surprised —
most, but not all of them, pleasantly — by Sharpe’s
cuisine. Some Winslow residents are regulars, and other northern
Arizona residents frequently drive long distances to eat at the
Turquoise Room.

Although Sharpe came to Winslow from
afar, he doesn’t see the Turquoise Room as an alien import.
While he flies in fish from Alaska, he loves the freshness of local
foods, and he likes to support regional suppliers. He employs and
trains local people — Native American, Hispanic, Anglo. He
buys churro lambs — a breed adapted to aridity — from a
Navajo family. He buys traditional piki corn bread from Hopi women,
and goat cheese from farmers nearby.

He also haunts the
weekly Flagstaff market, seeing what turns up. On the same day that
he finds out about the Gravenstein apples, he buys three flats of
beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes, choosing the soft ones other
shoppers eschew. He can use them, soon, for slicing or sauces. He
buys basil, melons, okra, and eggplant raised near Phoenix.
He’ll turn the eggplant into something he calls "native
ratatouille" — supplemented with corn and tepary beans
— and he’ll have some left over. "I’ll make
something else with it, too," he says. "I’ll figure it out on
the drive back."